Thrones of Ash (Kingdoms of Sand Book 3)

by Daniel Arenson

  Ofeer glanced back only once. Valentina was still staring at her, eyes narrowed. Then the princess's eyes widened. Ofeer froze with fear, staring into her half sister's eyes.

  Please, Ofeer thought.

  Valentina looked at her, kindness now replacing the shock in her eyes. The albino princess looked away, pointed toward a fabric stall at the opposite side of the avenue, and whispered something to Porcia. The new empress stared at the stall, nodded, and mumbled something in return.

  Ofeer exhaled shakily.

  Thank you.

  As the crowd still knelt, and as the procession still rode by, Ofeer slunk backward through the cloud, vanishing among them. As she passed by a cart selling apples, she reached up and grabbed a fruit; the merchant was still kneeling before the procession, head lowered. Ofeer moved onward, elbowing her way through, drawing glares and grumbles. By the time the procession had left the market, she was deep in the crowd, far from the guards who had chased her. With a few more steps, she left the marketplace, emerging back into the residential warrens of the city.

  I'm still too conspicuous, she thought. Her makeshift scarf—just a scrap torn off her tunic—was too obvious an attempt to hide a slave collar. Until she could find a cloak and hood, it was too dangerous to walk in the open. If word spread through the Guard that she was a wanted woman, it would not be long until they caught her.

  I have to flee the city, she thought. I have to . . .

  To what? What life remained for her outside Aelar? Starvation in the countryside? Zohar lay countless parsa'ot away, far too distant to reach, not without the gold to pay for passage on a ship. And even if she could go back to Zohar, she would only return a failure, her tail between her legs, her childhood home destroyed. No. Ofeer had come to Aelar to find a new life in the land of her father. That father was dead now, and this land was not what she had imagined, but she would not give up. She would find a life here in Aelar. She would survive.

  She padded through the labyrinth, trying to find her way back to the mausoleum where she had spent the night. She could hide there in the shadows, eat her apple, maybe find a stone and scrape off the letters engraved onto her tag. Once the sun set again, she could emerge, steal more food, maybe even steal a cloak and a proper scarf.

  Yet as she walked, Ofeer soon found herself lost. She could navigate the streets of Gefen blindfolded, but here was a sprawling maze that seemed to never end. The structures soared at her sides—apartment blocks, temples on hills, silos fluttering with doves, aqueducts and bridges, and fortified castra rife with soldiers. Aelar only had several main arteries; the bulk of its roads were alleyways so narrow Ofeer had to leap aside every time a chariot or wagon rolled by, pressing herself against brick walls. Nightsoil flowed through gutters, splashing her legs with every chamber pot dumped from windows high above, and the smoke from public kitchens stained her skin and filled her hair. She kept trying to spot the structures of the Acropolis, but she could no longer see them, and she was too afraid to approach anyone to ask.

  As Ofeer walked down alleyway after alleyway, she remembered her dream from the palace, where she had wandered endlessly through the halls, seeking a place to relieve herself. She had not eaten or drunk all day, and yet her bladder was aching in protest. Perhaps her babe pressed against it. She kept walking, seeking a public bathhouse, but could find none, and after an hour, her bladder ached so much that her teeth hurt. Finally she had no choice. She knelt above a gutter and relieved herself on the roadside, wincing as a passerby saw, scolded her, and hurled a stone her way. The rock hit her arm, but the shame was worse. She wandered on.

  This isn't who I am, she thought. I'm the daughter of an emperor. I'm the granddaughter of a desert king. This isn't me.

  Her eyes dampened, but Ofeer sniffed, refusing to let tears fall. She was covered in mud, smoke, and human waste. She wore only rags, and a collar encircled her neck, and the Guard would slay her if they caught her. And as Ofeer walked through Aelar, lost in the labyrinth, she did not know who she was: Ofeer Octavius, a proud Aelarian; Ofeer Sela, a noblewoman of the desert; or perhaps just Ofeer the urchin, pregnant with the child of incest, a grieving woman with no family but for the life that grew inside her.

  When the sun began to set, Ofeer found a street lined with private villas—smaller than the one on Pine Hill, only one or two rooms each, but a finer street than most in Aelar. Gardens—actual gardens with flowerbeds and cypress trees—grew here, a bit of greenery in a sprawling world of bricks. When the first stars emerged, Ofeer climbed over a stone wall—it was only a few feet tall—and landed in a house's garden. She skinned her knee, winced, and crawled into the shadows under a cypress.

  She tightened her lips, refusing to cry. She would be strong. This was just for one night. Just until she could find a way to remove her collar, find work, earn some money, and rent a room somewhere. Trembling, she pulled the apple from her pocket. Her tears splashed the fruit. She brought it to her lips.

  "You need food, child," she whispered to her son. "You—"

  The door to the house burst open. A man emerged, holding a lantern in one hand, a meat cleaver in the other. The lamplight fell on Ofeer, and she dropped her apple in fright.

  "Thief!" shouted the man. "Intruder!"

  Another man emerged from the house. Doors banged open in houses along the street, and people emerged with lanterns and knives.

  Ofeer ran.

  She leaped over the garden wall, banging both her knees, and slammed down hard onto the street. Her hip blazed with pain. She rose and ran onward, and the men chased. When she glanced over her shoulder, she saw their knives gleaming in the lamplight. She kept running, leaving the fine street, plunging back into the labyrinth of alleyways where apartment buildings soared toward the stars. Drunkards stood along the walls, leering, laughing. A whore hissed. Cats fled. Finally Ofeer lost the pursuit in the shadows, and she paused, placed her hands on her thighs, and breathed deeply.

  This wasn't supposed to happen. She trembled. This isn't what my life in Aelar should be.

  She could move no farther. She was too weak with hunger, and her knees bled. She walked toward a corner. In the darkness, she stepped into a shadowed gutter, and she felt the filth sluice around her feet, a mixture of mud and human waste. She winced, walked onward, and finally curled up in a dry, brick corner. A man was fucking a whore five amot away, his toga pulled up around his waist. He gave Ofeer only a glance and a grunt, then returned to his task.

  Ofeer lay on her side, pulled her knees to her chest, and tried to ignore the sounds of sex. The man kept groaning, and the whore kept crying out, the sound of a cat in heat, faked pleasure for a handful of denarii. Ofeer covered her ears, clenched her jaw, and tried to imagine that she lay back in her old bed in Zohar. The pines and lantanas would be rustling outside the window, and the moonlight would shine on the Encircled Sea below the hills. Across the villa, her family would be sleeping. Her parents. Her siblings. The people Ofeer had hated, the people she now loved more than anything in the world. Maya would be in her room right across the hallway; Ofeer could just look through the doorway and see the girl. Once she had scorned Maya, had loathed her. This night Ofeer would have given anything to see her sister again, to hold her, to say she was sorry.

  "I'm sorry, Maya," Ofeer whispered, tasting her tears. "I'm so sorry for what I did. For betraying you. For letting Seneca do all this. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

  She wiped her eyes with her fists. No. There was no use for this. There was no use in pretending to be back in Zohar. She could never return, and even if she could ever afford passage on a ship back east, she would find nothing but ruin. The legions had conquered the desert, and Zohar lay in waste. There was only Aelar now, only Ofeer with no last name, a woman torn down, destroyed, reduced to nothing but hunger and thirst and a need to survive, a woman with a child inside her.

  "From nothingness I will rise," Ofeer whispered. "From ruins I will rebuild. Zohar was destroyed, and so was I." She tremble
d. "But I will not die. I will not be this wretch. I will still find a life here in Aelar. I swear this, my child. I swear this. This will not be your life. You will always be loved, and you will have a better life than I did. I swear. I swear."

  The whore screamed. Ofeer's belly rumbled. The shadows wrapped around her, and she shivered until dawn.

  PORCIA

  "Send them out!" she cried, her voice filling the amphitheater. "Send out the lions!"

  Porcia sat on her ivory throne beneath the golden canopy, drinking wine from a jeweled goblet. A slave knelt before her, a living footstool. Another slave refilled her mug, and Porcia gulped more wine. She stared down at the arena, and she laughed.

  "The lions! Let them feed."

  Eighty thousand people filled the amphitheater around her, covering the stone seats that circled the sandy arena below. Wealthy tradesmen and nobles. Generals of the legions. Commoners and even the poor. They had all come here to watch the games, to savor the blood, to worship her—Porcia Octavius, their empress, their goddess.

  The criminals stood below on the sand, clad in patches of armor, armed with daggers. They already bled. Porcia had beaten them herself, ripping their skin with her whip, laughing as the blood sprayed her. Traitors. Scum. Men who had refused to bow before her, who had dared demand the Senate rise again. Now the Senate was a pile of stones for dogs to piss on. Now all those who had defied her would pass through the entrails of lions.

  "Release them!" Porcia shouted, laughing as she drank.

  Below in the arena, trapdoors opened on the floor, and the lions emerged. Porcia had been starving the beasts for days now, banging on the bars of their cages to drive them mad, eating in front of them, tempting them with juicy, bloody steaks she would let them smell but never taste. The beasts were half-mad now with hunger, yanking at their chains, nearly mauling their trainers.

  "Feed now, friends!" Porcia waved her wine mug, spilling droplets. She had prime seats, right above the first few rows, so close she could count the lions' teeth. "Mother lets you eat now."

  The trainers released the leashes, and the lions pounced.

  The outlaws in the arena screamed. One man fell to his knees and covered his head. Another man tried to flee, only to find walls and locked doors. A few tried to fight, lashing their daggers, only for the lions to knock the blades aside. And the lions fed. Their fangs ripped into throats. Their claws mauled the men, removing what skin Porcia had left. As the crowd cheered, the lions feasted, tugging out ribs, tearing off limbs, their hunger finally sated.

  Across the amphitheater, the crowd roared with joy. Children clapped. Young women pointed and laughed. Porcia's father had sometimes slain enemies here—the generals or kings or queens of vanquished nations. Rare shows, the blood spilling only monthly at best. Seneca probably would have outlawed the games altogether; he had always feared bloodshed. But she, Porcia, knew how to entertain the mob. She knew what the people craved. It was what she herself craved. What she dreamed of. What she would wash this empire with.

  "Blood," she whispered and licked the wine off her lips.

  When the lions had completed their meal, their trainers led them back underground. Now new beasts emerged, imported from beyond the easternmost reaches of the Empire, from the forests of distant lands where the rain never stopped. Here were the fabled tigers, felines even larger than lions, striped and ferocious. The crowd gasped to see them. Marcus had never shown them such wondrous beasts.

  "Bring out more prisoners!" Porcia cried from her seat.

  Yet the soldiers in the arena—men of the Magisterian Guard—merely glanced at one another. One of them stood at Porcia's side, a hulking man named Domitius, his neck raw and stubbly even after a shave. He was an ugly son of a whore, but loyal as a dog who licked the foot that kicked him. The brute bowed his head.

  "There are no more criminals, my empress." He was tall and powerful, the slayer of many men, yet now he gulped nervously. "Our dungeons are empty."

  Porcia whipped her head toward him. She frowned. "But I imprisoned thousands. Thousands of traitors!"

  Domitius nodded. "Yes, domina. Yet the thousands of scum are dead. Fed to lions. Crucified. Burned. Drawn and quartered. Cooked in bronze bulls. Sawed in half. Flayed and left to rot. All gone. These traitors fed to the lions were the last."

  Porcia groaned. No. No! She tossed her mug with rage, hitting a slave. She kicked her living footstool aside and stood up, staring down at the arena, panting. She had spent a fortune bringing these tigers here. They were the final act of the day's games! The first time Aelar would see the beasts feed! And now they ran out of food?

  She sneered.

  "Use the front row." She pointed at the nobles—soft men and women in dyed togas and stolas—who sat below her on pillows. "Feed those plump worms to the tigers. They paid handsomely for the finest seats." She barked a laugh. "Let them get an even closer look."

  Her guards nodded, saluted, and marched down to the front row. The nobles bristled as the guards grabbed them. They tried to pull back.

  "What is the meaning of this?" rumbled a barrel-chested, gray-haired man.

  "Release me!" demanded a noblewoman. "On what charge do you seize us?"

  Porcia leaned down from her canopy.

  "A charge of treason!" she shrieked, laughing. "Treason that you should withhold meat from my pets. Traitors, traitors! Drag them into the arena. Let the tigers feed!"

  The nobles cried out in fear. The guards did their duty, dragging the soft, pale lords and ladies into the arena. Plump men and their plump wives and their plump children. Their meat soft. Their costly clothes easy to tear through.

  Porcia laughed as the tigers fed.

  When the games ended, Porcia rode her horse through the Acropolis, surveying her empire. Cages still hung from posts, and her enemies still rotted within—the dead senators, their flesh all but gone, now only bones bristly with skin and rot. The great statue of Seneca, once a hundred feet tall, now lay smashed on the hill. Porcia had left it there, the face hammered away, smeared with pig excrement and buzzing with flies. Her own statue still soared, gilded and brilliant in the sunlight—the statue of a goddess, victorious. Smaller statues of her—still thrice her height—rose outside every temple in the Acropolis, for the people of Aelar would now worship her alongside their old deities.

  She passed by the ruins of the Senate. Once a mighty building had risen here, among the largest and fairest in the world. She had enclosed the ruins with a wooden fence, and pigs wandered among the smashed marble, clad in shit-stained togas. The animals rutted in the dirt, squealing contentedly. Her new senators. Each pig wore a collar engraved with the name of the senator it replaced. Porcia laughed whenever she rode by them. The pigs were better senators than men had ever been.

  Porcia dismounted her horse outside her palace, climbed the marble stairs, and entered her throne room.

  Emperor Marcus, raised a commoner, had never spent much time in this grand hall of opulence. Only when entertaining dignitaries had the man sat here on the throne. But Porcia had taken to spending most of her days and nights here. She had redesigned the hall, making it fit for a goddess. Ewers lay tilted over, spilling out golden coins and gemstones across the floor, so that when Porcia walked she scattered them and heard them chink. New frescoes covered the walls, depicting her in armor, slaying twisted and swarthy Zoharites. Rugs and pillows rose around the throne, and her concubines lounged upon them, a hundred young men and women, clad in translucent silks and endless jewels.

  "I'm home!" Porcia said, laughing. "Fetch me my pearls."

  A slave rushed forth, holding out a goblet. Porcia took it. Inside floated pearls dissolved in vinegar, soft as pickled onions. She drank them and licked her lips. The true elixir of a goddess.

  "Dance for me!" she said. "Love me. Worship me."

  As the sun set outside, light and laughter filled her hall. Her concubines danced and sang around her, laughing, drinking wine. Slaves brought forth platinum bath
s full of more wine, and Porcia bathed in them, splashed the wine, laughed, drank, fell, rose, danced. She lay with her concubines on the pillows. She let two men take her at once, and she cried out so loudly she thought the palace would crumble. She took two women next, took them violently, then passed out into puddles of wine, only for slaves to pour more wine into her mouth, reviving her, and she rose, took another man. All around her, the concubines made drunken love, a great orgy of a hundred souls, fucking over gemstones and gold and imperial glory.

  Porcia knew the rumors, knew what Seneca had said about her. Knew of that journal that supposedly existed in the city. A forgery. Lies! Lies she had made into truths. If the people already spoke of her sins, why not commit such sins? Why not love the world? She was an empress of love. Of wine. Of wealth. Of games. Of decadence. She ruled the world. She ruled the heavens. She was the sun, the moon, the stars. She was the sword of Aelar and her sweet milk and splendor. She was drenched in light.

  "It's mine," she whispered, lying on a pile of men and women, staring at the jeweled ceiling. "The world is mine. I am the empress. I am the goddess. I am everything."

  Yet when she closed her eyes, Porcia still saw him. His pathetic, pouty face. His scheming eyes.

  Seneca.

  Her younger brother was out there, on the sea, heading to Nur. He would commandeer her legions there. He was planning her death. Porcia knew this. Knew he would return with an army, would try to steal all this from her, would try to deprive the Empire of her glory.

  "We'll stop him," she whispered to the drunken, sleeping people around her. "We'll muster our forces. We'll summon the fleet. I swear this on the stars above and the demons of the underworld: We will be victorious. Seneca will die."

  Her eyes rolled back, and Porcia slept, and she dreamed of stabbing her brother over and over, ripping out his heart, and laughing as he died at her feet.